I do see Active undelete. It's a data restoration application which is really only needed if data on the drive is lost. IE: the harddrive was reformatted; some of the data can be retrieved. Your data is still there, it just needs to be accessed.

Ok, well. Most laptops (that are sold with Vista) come with the "Vista Upgrade Disc". That can serve as a means of attempting to repair the installation. If you have that disc, pop it in an boot to it. Attempt to use the Startup Repair option on the repair screen for Vista.

Absolutely not. My HP came with the Upgrade Disc and I just assumed use it, but I will further assume that the disc you have serves the very same purpose. as long as it has Vista's primary installation files.

Your disk that came with the machine is the disk to install the operating system.. though I don't think it'll necessarily have the repair option that the original Windows XP disks had.

Be careful as to not format your drive if your using the operating system disk. Formatting the drive will cause all of your data to be lost. - It'll warn you more than once usually, but be careful not to just click through.

I threw the laptop HDD as a secondary in my desktop, and the computer fails to boot. It finally comes to a chkdisk, and after the scan it justs sits there. So, I decided I'd try booting into safe mode on this desktop's HDD, and see if I can access the laptop HDD and just pull the files from there. Safe mode runs extremely slow, and eventually freezes. But, I do see it asking me to install the driver for the generic volume. So, if I was to find the driver for the laptop HDD online, could I install it and use it that way, without it doing any damage to this desktop?